Giving Form

Nikolaus Hirsch Recent projects of yours have put you in a very political role, or at least one with a certain exposure in the political field. Has your professional trajectory, from building studios, homes, and installations, very often in collaboration with artists, to much more public projects, changed how you see your role as an architect?

David Adjaye My career started under the agency or patronage of artists, at a particular moment when the group of artists that I was working for were trying to find their own voice in public. They were operating in galleries, museums, etc., but in the early 2000s, there was sense throughout Britain that the art world could shape cultural thought. It was even politicized by Tony Blair's government, being used to talk about the resurgence of the country. All these artists that I was working with felt performative in this scenario. Everything they did became instrumentalized, so I was instrumentalized by them. They were artists whose private practice was made visible by the media, so the spaces they worked in and the things they wanted to do became very public. What might have started as an architectural commission might have evolved into me acting as an agent in between them and their gallery, or an institution. Bringing in an independent third person who could make and intervene on their behalf was a way for them to try and create a sort of resistance, to gain control within this system.

NH Like a buffer?

DA Not so much a buffer, because buffers shut down. More like a negotiator, almost an interlocutor. It was the idea of being able to represent for the artist. For example, Chris Offili’s work, The Upper Room, was a project for a commercial gallery. He was given the gallery to work in, but the gallery had certain constraints. So Chris wanted to work with me, independent from the gallery, to understand what he wanted to do, and then drop it on the gallery. I remember when we had to present it to the gallery, they were completely shocked and felt kind of isolated. But I think Chris needed to create the control that he wanted. My beginnings were negotiating between what is the private sector and what is the public sector, or even what is the public institution and what is the artist. My beginnings were negotiating where the art, or where the architecture, was.

Chris Ofili, The Upper Room, London, 2002. Photo: Lyndon Douglas.

NH How do you see this role of a negotiator carrying out in your more recent, and larger projects, like the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC?

DA Washington was the ultimate negotiation, because it was fifty-seven curators working to construct a narrative that's been buried and denied for 200 years. My job was to be an architect for the institution called the Smithsonian, but at the same time, I always felt that my job was not just to be their architect, but also to be the architect for this community that felt it wanted a certain kind of agency that was not to be privatized or commodified. It was probably the most public arena that I've had to operate like that in thus far, but I’m really thinking about the connection between this type of work and what I was doing earlier. If you look at it through the lens of typology and deconstruction, it might not be there, but if you look at it through the idea of agency, negotiation, and form making, it's completely clear.

Nick Axel If you are, in a sense, scaling this up, how far does it go? I'm thinking of your recent cathedral project, in Accra, in which the positioning of the project in the city is highly significant.

DA Accra was a colonial city designed by the British. It was an apartheid city, with a quarter for whites and then a quarter for the indigenous. Nkrumah's independence plan was about beginning to weld the two systems together and to re-stitch the fissures. Nkrumah’s plan was done by people like Winky Scott and other European architects. There were no trained Ghanaian Architects at the time because Ghanaians weren't allowed to be architects during the colonial period, so there was no architectural education for Ghanaians. Nkrumah worked with Scottish Architects who had great sympathy for Ghana. Scotland and Ghana have a very interesting relationship, an empathy in their mutual resistance against the British. Nkrumah played on that and brought architects in to scramble the colonial construct. Nkrumah failed because he didn't understand global forces. Globalization checkmated him and caused a coup to happen, and he was exiled. But the germ of the idea lived on in the generations that were brought up around Nkrumah.

NA So Nkrumah’s germ of an idea is finally starting to grow?

DA The current President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, is one of the children that grew up around Nkrumah. His father, who later became president in the evolution of the country, worked with Nkrumah. So the Cathedral project is birthed in that idea, the project of remaking the city. When Akufu-Addo came to power, he called me and said, we have a lot of work to do, and I really want you to come back to work in Ghana. I had no built work in Africa at that point. But he said that, he really wanted me to work on a project that would symbolize what he was trying to work towards. A month later I got another call where he asked me to build the Ghana National Cathedral. I was, I have to admit, a bit shocked, and confused, but I understood what he meant was that he wanted to make a ground zero, a place that started to remake the city and the country.

NA How can you do that with just a piece of architecture?

DA The project is really about planting a new seed in the old ground to remake the city. He calls it the “sacred space of the nation,” and what he means is that architecture can be used to reimagine the city, to reimagine a new future. And he's right. That's exactly what architecture is very powerful at doing. The National Cathedral project is a new enclave. We said that if we're going to do this, we shouldn’t just consider the urban city. We needed to scrape the old city away. We looked at the plan, and there was an avenue that connected with the Parliament. Scraping away that ground—a British landscaped garden—would allow us to start afresh, to reframe the landscape as a new vernacular for the country. The National Cathedral consists of a chamber placed on a cultural podium that houses education, infrastructure, cultural, and support functions. The idea is that the plinth registers the datum of the colonial city, and the cathedral sits on top of that. It's a re-reading of the context, because when you get onto that plinth, you have a privileged view of something which was constructed with the idea to divide. In giving you a privileged view, you can reimagine the city.

NH Earlier on you mentioned the word "visibility." One could argue that architecture is about the construction of visibility, of making a certain history readable and connecting it to something for, or even from the future. This is a particular understanding of the role of the architect, far from an architecture as service industry. It's also contested, dangerous. But in more general terms, would you argue that the role of an architect is to construct visibility? That it's form making for processes that tend to escape visibility or tangibility?

DA I can't speak for the whole of architecture, but I can say in my practice, and in the way the world is remaking, or rethinking itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there's really a call to action about visibility and form. There's a collapse of an old order, an old way of looking at the world, and there's a reformatting of the world. But I've never known a time when architecture was not part of that agency. So for me to even speculate that architecture should or should not be seems naïve, because it will. If you look at the last twenty years of architectural production, what’s been expressed is the thinking of neoliberal capitalism. Architects don’t just do what they want in a vacuum. The consciousness of form, the nature of form, and the implication of form is so profoundly important for architects to understand.

NA In a very different space and different role within the public, you've recently completed, or are working on a number of housing projects in New York. Two of these projects, Sugar Hill and 130 William, are perhaps representative of this changing system at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Sugar Hill, you see new life injected into the old idea of social housing, and in 130 William, you see the financialization of real estate. Could you speak to what the architect might be able to do within cities that are facing not just symbolic, but also very material challenges?

DA Well, speaking through those two projects, I think the agency that the architect has in the arena between hyper-capitalism and hyper-socialism is the ability to find an idea which binds both. What I mean by that is, the rampant rejection of the architecture of the 1960s and any kind of social project for a glossy, glassy, stony architecture of the late twentieth century plays into what I call an architectural amnesia. It’s like you forget the past, and just construct something that makes you feel good. For me, it's like Pinocchio's Pen: you're becoming a donkey, but it feels good. I'm very interested in a resistance to that.

Adjaye Associates, Sugar Hill, New York, 2015. Photo: Wade Zimmerman.

NA Is that something you feel like you’ve been able to achieve in both projects, despite the radical difference between their clients and respective communities?

DA If you compare the aesthetics of William Street and Sugar Hill, they're actually not that different. They're the same materiality, they’re physically the same thing, but the narrative is spun differently. 130 William speaks to the idea of the professional and is, within that context, relatively affordable. The tower provides an opportunity for professionals to live and work in Manhattan and not to move to Brooklyn. The explosion that's happening in Brooklyn, with towers ramping up everywhere, is really a reflection of the unaffordable, unsustainable, and saturated market of Manhattan. The client behind this tower had the idea to change that. They’re not about just reaching for the peak number, but rather creating a kind of vertical village of possibility. That's what drew me to the client and the subsequent decision to work with them, because their idea of profit was also about the idea of social gain, as well as economic success. We have created a new public plaza—a pocket park in front of the building—which no other tower in the whole of downtown has. So 130 William is, in its own way, trying to talk about the social responsibility of wealth and what it does within and for the city.

NA What about Sugar Hill?

DA Sugar Hill similarly talks about the social responsibility of wealth, but in this instance its narrative talks to the prejudice of poverty. This project was about making a new urban system—a building that was not just about social housing, but also about education, generational interchange, commerce, and culture. But there was a big campaign launched against it by its neighbors, who thought it would devalue their properties by bringing homeless people to the neighborhood. Our major challenge was shifting mindsets about social housing, that it didn’t have to be something that was built cheaply, quickly, without character and usually, in this part of Manhattan, built to grid, using bricks and a certain size of double glazed windows. Sugar Hill did not feature any of these standard elements. Instead it takes a bespoke approach and was envisioned, developed, and built with the community and people at its heart. As such Sugar Hill has shifted the paradigm and many are now describing the area as undergoing a second renaissance. Sugar Hill has renewed a commitment, on the part of the city authorities, to social initiatives as well as widened access to public housing. And this has, in turn, and more importantly, assisted social cohesion and further re-generation initiatives in this part of the city.

NA In the face of a lot of these challenges, these urban pressures that capitalism has placed, there seems to be renewed attention, at least in New York, on the question of typology, from micro apartments to supertalls. Do you think that these kind of typological innovations are necessary? Or, in a very stupid way, do we just need people to be better people?

DA The beautiful thing about architecture is that it's not static. It’s nuanced and always changing. So, an apartment tower built by Mies would be loved by purists, but actually wouldn’t really work today the way it was designed to. The notion that typology is always being changed with every generation is part of the reason why we make architecture. It's continually having to be retooled, remade. I think that's valid. I'm not against the idea of making and evolving typologies. But I am acutely nervous about the way in which novelty is playing a really powerful part in the way in which neoliberal projects are working. It's about the novelty of the form rather than the performance of the form.

NH So, novelty is not per se already a form making. Or form making would include other criteria.

DA Novelty permeates as the ideal of evolution, when it’s simply the complexity of form entering the social arena as a kind of social performance, to entertain, like a minstrel.

×

​Positions is an initiative of e-flux Architecture. This interview took place during the e-flux conversation series Practice at Milano Arch Week 2018, held at the e-flux Teatrino pavilion designed by Matteo Ghidoni—Salottobuono, made with the help of the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia (FVG) Region and by Filiera del Legno FVG (with the coordination of Regione FVG and Innova FVG).

David Adjaye is a British architect of Tanzanian and Ghanaian descent. His influences range from contemporary art, music, and science, to African art forms and the civic life of cities.

Many years ago, I graduated from college with a degree in architecture and moved to New York. It was 2003, and I got a job as a research assistant to a writer who was working on a book about the World Trade Center reconstruction. While I was reporting, both as an assistant and as a young reporter trying to break into regular and compensated (as opposed to the other kind—uncompensated) writing, I recalled the day of 9/11. I had been leading an Urban Action program for a group of incoming...

1. A Fire Station
The critic sits at her office busy with her private quests and investigations. She has been trying to lose the label of being a critic, and has been refusing the role. Aware of the uneasy stance of the profession these days, she prefers to see herself as a writer. She likes to write.
A far from odd request suddenly lands in her inbox. It comes from afar, through a foreign intermediary. A magazine on the other side of the world requires a review of four recent...

Nikolaus Hirsch It seems as if the practice of designing architecture is changing. Not dramatically but there is—despite or because of the ubiquity/ubuiquous images of “good design”—an increasing uneasiness with the way we produce and value buildings. Today some of the most challenging protagonists of the field define design in a different way: not as designing anew but in terms of activation.
Andrés Jaque Architecture should be treated not as an origin but as a trajectory. We try to...

This building has never been built, nor does it ever plan to be. Yet this mythic edifice has been scrupulously documented, updated, circulated, and stored in in the contemporary architect/technician’s peripheral memory. It inhabits office start-up screens around the world, yet can never be occupied. Autodesk Revit’s Basic Sample Project is a Building Information Model in multiple senses—it is an information-rich simulation, a how-to manual, and a technical exemplar of software...

In what is arguably one of the most disturbing scenes in the history of cinema, Danny Torrance, a young boy left to his own devices by his neurotic parents, explores the hotel in which he is confined by the snow outside on his tricycle. The camera follows closely behind at tricycle height as he crosses swaths of carpet with maze-like interlocking hexagons pattern, with a soft, muted sound emanating from the wheels traveling over the textile in the corridors, and dark, reflective wooden...

The corner lot at 550 West 20th Street wears all the markers of a disused prison, because it is one. Somewhere else, in the media ether of do-good development, a press release declares this property “The Women’s Building.” The rhetorical act anticipates a project of architectural renovation, avowing from the outset to “turn a place of women’s confinement and pain” into a place of women’s empowerment. In its Vimeo version, Gloria Steinem appears to affirm this project as a deferred feminist...

When they talk about their work in public, Zurich-based architects Thomas Padmanabhan and Oliver Lütjens invariably begin with a series of seemingly straightforward statements: “We love the city,” they say. “We love streets, squares and façades.” 1
In their deadpan frankness, these words are oddly disarming. They sound old-fashioned for one thing—have we not lost the ability to appreciate such simple pleasures?—yet also heavily ironic. One can sense a “but…” coming, and it does, but with...

Architecture was once a plant. By this I do not only refer to the grasslands and savannas that sheltered early homo sapiens or the trees used in the construction of so-called primitive huts. Nor do I refer only to the logic of wood and vegetal construction that is embedded in the forms and figures of Egyptian and Greek temples and that serve as protagonists in the prevailing narratives of the evolution of Western building. Rather, I also refer to the more limited and specific plants that...

Since e-flux Architecture launched almost three years ago, it has become a locus for contemporary debate and research into architecture in the expanded field. We have collaborated with leading institutions from around the world in charting out new frontiers of architectural knowledge, from ecology and technology to history and politics. While we will continue this march forward into uncharted terrains, we cannot help but notice that, for as much as architecture’s frontier has expanded, its...

Jencks was right when he predicted that “the iconic building is here to stay.” 1 Its generalization and expansion in the form of so-called “image architecture” has become central to the way cities are being shaped across the world. Since the early 2010s, the phenomenon of image architecture has been joined by another one essentially based around similar tenets, if often adjusted to a rhetoric of economic modesty and smaller scales: a version of postmodernism currently present in biennales,...

Nick Axel Architecture is always a product of its time. It registers the social, economic, and political conditions within which a project has come into being, not to mention the cultural, ideological, and aesthetic agendas fueling its realization. The architect, then, is like a meteorologist, with projects as their barometers. Your practice started in Spain in the early 2000s, in a period of euphoric construction. Then, the financial system underpinning it collapsed. Can you describe what...

“ El Caballo ” ( The Horse ), a seven-ton bronze equestrian statue of general Francisco Franco, was removed from Ferrol’s Plaza de España in 2002. Originally erected as a gift from the Spanish city to the dictator in 1967, the monument presided over its main public space for nearly forty-five years. It had endured demonstrations and soft vandalism, yet after being attacked with explosives, the municipal government of Xaime Bello decided to loan the statute to the army, placing it in...

Nick Axel You have done a lot of work after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami dealing with reconstruction. Can you speak to the type of effect this event has had on the practice of architecture in Japan?
Toyo Ito After the earthquake and the tsunami, architects were not called on by anyone in Japan. Those who were called were the engineers. So after the tsunami, we had to proactively go to the municipalities to propose something. We went and had conversations with the people who...

Nikolaus Hirsch Architecture is a schizophrenic profession. There is, on the one hand a form of practice that believes in design and building as a problem-solving practice, and on the other, there is a form of practice that finds and somehow constructs problems through research, analysis, critique. The field of architecture seems to split between those who build and those who research and question its relevance in a broader social-political sphere. You are one of the few who seem to bridge...

Nikolaus Hirsch Part of the architect´s profession seems to be the permanent reinvention of what it means to be an architect. A constant process of self-legitimation that keeps on changing the foundations of the practice. Some of the exhibitions you curated over the past few years have been quite instrumental in proposing an expansive idea of architectural practice. For instance, the exhibition The Other Architect , or, on questions of medicine, the exhibition Imperfect Health , or...

Nikolaus Hirsch We are interested in the contradictions and potentials of today’s architectural practice, and in speculating on what this practice might be in the future. How has your own practice and your way of thinking and working changed as an effect of the deep societal, technological, and economic changes that have taken place over the past decades?
Juan Herreros The question of what kind of architect was and is possible has been crucial in the different forms of offices I...

Nick Axel How do you see your role as an architect today?
Sou Fujimoto My role as an architect is to create space for people, space that does not control but that allows for different things to happen. Space that inspires people to behave as they like, or beyond. Architecture belongs to society, no matter how small or large. So architects have a responsibility to give shape or form to society, which will hopefully make society better and people happier.
Nikolaus Hirsch...

Nikolaus Hirsch You have a very expansive practice, ranging from design to curating, art directing, and editing. How do you understand the role of architecture and architects in this expanded field?
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli I feel like there has been a general shift from construction to media, but I don’t have a theory for it, and I believe my case is specific to my background. I'm a product of Italian schools, which until some years ago provided a very broad education. I'm...

Nikolaus Hirsch What is design?
Paola Antonelli I am not able to answer that question. It's a little bit like asking what art is or what food is. A definition is not possible, or at least I am not able to give one. I have my own ways to distinguish design from art, for instance, but not really from engineering.
NH And from architecture?
PA Architecture is part of design. I studied architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan, and because of that I have a sort of panic...

Nikolaus Hirsch Recent projects of yours have put you in a very political role, or at least one with a certain exposure in the political field. Has your professional trajectory, from building studios, homes, and installations, very often in collaboration with artists, to much more public projects, changed how you see your role as an architect?
David Adjaye My career started under the agency or patronage of artists, at a particular moment when the group of artists that I was working...

The City is a Res Publica.
The Right to Access to most of the City will be universal.
Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’s Public.
Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’s private that’s open to the General Public.
Private accommodation, hospitality, commerce, and other services, prospects, events, and possibilities offered to the General Public shall be subject to a Determination of Access by the City Department of Public Access....

Imagine you are looking through a sequence of photographs. One image after another, all of empty rooms. On superficial inspection, they all look the same. And they seem to show the same thing: nothing. No furniture, no people. Just empty rooms inside empty apartments. The rooms are clean and white. They look new. The light is diffuse, northern. Even the shadows it throws are soft. In one room is a floor of polished concrete, in another, wooden parquet. Sometimes there is a window visible, a...

Thanos Zartaloudis The urban protocols started as a collection of images, designs, photographs, and sketches, which later took a new form in Archipelago of Protocols . 1 No direct explanation is, however, given in the book concerning their character, form, or manner. How could a dialogue be initiated about this peculiar textual, literary, architectural exercise, or what appears to be, at first sight, an essential difference between architectural writing and legal writing or law-making?...

Global environmental change poses two immediate challenges to architecture: the first is how to respond to its myriad consequences, from rapid transformations in land-use to food scarcity or population displacements; the second is how to re-assess the legal, ethical and political limits of architecture’s responsibilities, as—from an environmental perspective—these cannot be confined to the limits of the building. All around the world several inroads are being made to address these issues,...

Everybody knows that our cities
Were built to be destroyed
—Caetano Veloso
As the architecture profession continues to struggle in a contemporary landscape where economic and technological forces erode its agency, every Venice Biennale begins by answering a single question before making any other statement: What is architecture? This obstruction makes it difficult to find the common ground necessary to make a cohesive large-scale exhibition like the International Architecture...

Expanding the Self
On a February evening of 1969, Coop Himmelblau’s Astroballon was presented at Galerie nächst St. Stephan, an avant-garde gallery in the heart of Vienna. 1 Documentation from the opening night performance shows a spherical shell of pliable, transparent PVC plastic strung from the ceiling, wires and tubes cascading. Inside the bubble is a woman, her face calm, her arms outstretched. Small light bulbs speckled across the semi-plump skin of the sphere flicker and...

We’re Solarpunk because the only other options are denial or despair.
—Adam Flynn 1
By now, dystopia may have become a luxury genre. Indulging in miserable future scenarios is not something everyone has time for. William Gibson recently repurposed his own adage, “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed” to say that “dystopia is not very evenly distributed” either. 2 For most, the dystopias the privileged entertain themselves with are old news. In the current...

One or two years ago, describing Junya Ishigami’s architecture would likely conjure imagery of delicate and immaculately conceived structures tending towards invisibility. Often veiled in and populated with plant life, it was as if he sought to demarcate space with the tiniest fraction, a whisper, of manmade matter.
Yet, his new work and writing suggests that the last decade of practice and research has culminated in a new project of a different weight entirely. Ishigami’s “freeness”...

We’ll build houses like we used to, without roofs and without walls
—Vincenzo Agnetti 1
After World War II, the view of Milan from Monte Stella—the artificial hill made out of rubble from the allied bombing designed by and dedicated to the wife of Piero Bottoni—was quite sad. These were the years of the ricostruzione , the material and metaphorical reconstruction of Italy after fascism; the opportunity to hurry Italy into the future, into industrialization, into the modernity...

Computers are machines: so we tend to think they work like all the other machines we know. They don't. Computers are a new kind of machine. They do not work like any other machine we have ever seen during the modern age and the industrial revolution. Computers are post-industrial, post-modern, post-scientific machines. If we use computers to make physical stuff, computers follow a technical logic that is the opposite of that of the industrial age. And if we use computers to process...

In Ansbach, Germany, sporting goods company Adidas is opening the first fully operational version of its so-called Speedfactory concept, in which trainers and other sport shoes will be produced using the latest technology in computerized knitting, additive manufacturing, and robotics. A “digital twin” of the production chain, developed by Siemens, allows for testing and optimization in a virtual shop floor before actual implementation of new processes. Faster production, shorter supply...

For much of their history European cities have been unhealthy places. Until the end of the nineteenth century, they were traversed by waves of infection that would thrive in the close assemblage of people and livestock. Urban mortality rates were so great that sustained migration from the countryside was the only way cities could maintain their population levels stable. 1
This may seem a distant past now that “health” is understood in opposition either to aging or to diseases, such as...

In 1930, the French colonial regime celebrated the hundredth anniversary of France’s colonization of Algeria, known as Le Centenaire de l’Algérie française (Centenary of French Algeria). These colonial celebrations were held in Algiers and in other cities in Algeria under French rule (1830–1962) during the first six months of 1930, and included a number of commemorative, artistic, theatrical, and sport festivals and events. According to Gustave Mercier, French lawyer and general curator of...

“Mere decorating,” we say without thought. The former modifies the latter with such frequency that the words appear natural together. In fact, the Cambridge Dictionary gives, as an example of the usage of the adverb “merely,” the sentence: “These columns have no function and are merely decorative.” 1 A Google search for the twinned words “mere” and “decorating” turns up 1,420 results. Meanwhile, “merely decorative” has 166,000 results and “mere decoration” gets us another 155,000.
In...

Michael Bloomberg, once referred to as “America’s greenest mayor,” launched One Million Trees for New York (MTNYC) in 2007. 1 This project, initiated as the subprime mortgage crisis started to be noticed, ventured to protect citizens from the effects of air pollution and climate change. Working to add the eponymous number of trees to the city, MTNYC was considered the largest urban afforestation effort in the world. Highlighting the benefits of improved air quality, increased shading, and...

Karl Marx once observed that revolutionaries, seemingly engaged in “creating something that did not exist before,” will “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” 1 Written in the aftermath of France’s failed revolution of 1848, Marx goes on to note in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that “the tradition...

In 2012, Facebook signed on its one billionth user. To celebrate the occasion, the company commissioned filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu—of Amores Perros and Babel fame—to make their first-ever brand video, “to express what [their] place is on this earth.” 1 Born eight years earlier as a Harvard “hobby,” Facebook had established itself as global socio-technical infrastructure, one that was transforming the way people “get together, open up,” and “feel human,” in the words of the...

In short, when the muck comes back up onto the sidewalks, it is memory flooding back —a certain long-buried historic past that re-emerges suddenly into the present in the form of a rag, a scrap, a remnant.
—Georges Didi-Huberman 1
[W]hat do we do when questions are too big for everybody, and especially when they are much too grand for the writer, that is, for myself?
—Bruno Latour 2
This article is not about the damage of the 2017 Central Mexico earthquake, but about...

It is hard to imagine how the many ruptures that have occurred in the composition of whatever may be called "normality" today do not render canonical architectural knowledge a distant constellation, receding from our present. Nor is it difficult to see how such ruptures are themselves a stern reminder of our need for new forms of knowledge altogether—forms that reject the assurances of a professionalized architectural discourse, and that call instead for a new horizon of common,...

In the comedy of errors that is US car culture, contradictions and cross-purposes seem to thrive. The mid-twentieth century monovalent highway network replaced a finely grained rail network to conform with default modernist scripts that claim newer is better. In perennial cycles of obsolescence and replacement, new infrastructure technologies have overwritten existing networks, however intelligent or efficient they may be. Adhering to false logics of traffic engineering that linked roadway...

Athens used to be small town. In 1922, following the war the Greeks lost against Turkey, she was asked to take in a large part of the 1.2 million refugees from Asia Minor. The refugees were placed in camps outside the city, which in time grew into suburbs, all named after the places the displaced Greeks left behind: Ionia, Smyrna, and Philadelphia all used to be towns on the coast of Turkey, and in Athens, they were all New. Athens became a city of refugees, and as she struggled to deal with...

Consider the following exchange from the infamous press conference conducted by the President of the United States in the lobby of his fading, brassy New York tower on 15 August 2017, three days after the death of Heather Heyer, a peaceful counterprotestor at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, who was murdered, allegedly, by a Nazi sympathizer:
Reporter: Do you think that what you call the alt-left is the same as neo-Nazis?
President: All of those...

I have read e-flux’s privacy policy and agree that e-flux may send me announcements to the email address entered above and that my data will be processed for this purpose in accordance with e-flux’s privacy policy*

Next

e-flux

e-flux Architecture

art-agenda

Exhibitions at commercial galleries

Art & Education

Exhibitions, symposia and teaching positions at art schools world wide

Thank You!

Subscription pending. Your email subscription is almost complete. An email has been sent to the email address you entered. In this email is a confirmation link. Please click on this link to confirm your subscription.

Close

* This consent can be revoked at any time with effect for the future. For more information, please see our privacy policyIf you have any questions regarding data protection, please contact dataprivacy [​at​] e-flux.com